Building the Ultimate Linux Workstation

We went to hardware experts to find the best and fastest components for building your own Linux workstation. Here's how to make a responsive system with high-performance 3-D, fast disk, lush sound and the little things to keep it trouble-free.

Network Card

The network card market is rather dull right now: Intel seems
to dominate, despite some occasional complaints about hardware
changing out from under the drivers and causing unpredictable
problems with certain combinations of network traffic. If you're
building your own box, you should be qualified to build a new
kernel if you have to update the Ethernet driver.

Miscellaneous: Power Supply, Case,
Cooling

Whatever you do, don't buy the latest hot CPU and drives and
then mount them in a case with inadequate cooling, or hook them up
to a flaky power supply that's going to blow out and fry
everything. One of the ways a switching power supply can fail is to
put the input voltage straight into the parts that are expecting 5
or 12 volts DC. That's not good.

If you live on the bleeding edge, hardware-wise, then your
case, power supply and fans will outlast several motherboards and
CPUs. Some people take the motherboard and CPU from what was a hot
desktop box and use it in a web server. Again, think about being
able to shuffle the components you buy today into another machine
next year.

Mike chooses PC Power and Cooling power supplies, with
Sparkle Power as a second choice. PC Power and Cooling has one
called the “Silencer”, which makes a Linux box a little more
pleasant to share a room with.

Choose a case with plenty of room to work inside, a side
panel that's easy to remove, and several places to install fans.
Mike builds quite a few heavy-duty Linux servers for small
companies that don't have dedicated air-conditioned server rooms or
rack space. That means he needs a tower case with a lot of cooling
capacity, and he recommends Supermicro. They make a tower case with
mounting points for fans in all the standard places, as well as
blowing sideways across the drives. Direct airflow is absolutely
required for the 10,000RPM drives that go into an ultimate Linux
box. Otherwise, they will soon cook themselves.

A Canadian company, AMK, makes a series of cases called the
“Overclocker's Dream”, with exhaust fans mounted in “blowholes”
in the top of the case. If you don't mind keeping the top of your
machine clear, blowholes are an efficient way to get the hottest
air out.

Jason points out that adding fans can sometimes make heat
problems worse. You can create a vortex that traps hot air near an
important component or, worse, add too many exhaust fans and not
enough intake fans. Hobbyists often add an extra exhaust fan or
fans to try to suck out the hot air, but if you have too many fans
blowing out and not enough blowing in, then the power supply, and
maybe the CPU, can overheat. A typical ATX power supply has a fan
on the back and a set of vents positioned somewhere above the CPUs.
In normal operation, the power supply fan draws air from above the
CPUs and exhausts it, cooling the power supply and helping to cool
the CPUs. But if the system has too many exhaust fans, they create
a negative pressure inside the case, cancel out the efforts of the
power supply fan, stop the flow of air inside the power supply and
turn it into an expensive toaster.

Two rules to keep in mind when adding fans to the case are
first, balance the type and number of intake and exhaust fans; and
second, remember that hot air rises—put intake fans low and
exhaust fans high. And don't run with the case open any more than
you have to. You're just opening it up to severe interference from
other devices. “My cell phone rang and my computer went
blaaargh”, says Jason.

Ultimate Linux boxes can be loud. Drives, CPU fans,
front-panel fans, back panel fans...pretty soon it sounds like
you're working inside a hovercraft. Jason Collins plans to install
a “DigitalDoc 2”, available from AMK. It's a control panel that
fits in a drive bay and provides thermostatic control for fans. His
fans of choice are “badass” new ones from Delta that can move 32
cubic feet of air per second. Jason is also putting sound-deadening
material on the sides of his case to keep it from
resonating.

And, of course, you'll need a UPS. The most important benefit
of having one on a workstation isn't to keep your system running
during power failures. An extended blackout will drain its battery.
The big benefit is that the UPS warns you when it's running on
battery, giving you time to shut down cleanly.

Both APC and Tripp Lite make well-regarded UPSes with serial
ports. Penguin Computing had to choose between them. Ockman says
that his answer to “Why don't you sell our UPS?” was, “Why don't
you GPL your control software?” So they did. APC won't even
release the specs for their protocol. Until APC realizes that
making their protocol available to open-source developers isn't
going to result in the loss of their U-boat fleet in the Atlantic,
let's put them with NVIDIA on the list of companies we'll be happy
to support when they get a clue.

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